Edward Christopher Sheeran, MBE (born 17 February 1991) is an English singer-songwriter. In early 2011, Sheeran independently released the extended play, No. 5 Collaborations Project. After signing with Asylum Records, his debut album, + (pronounced "plus"), was released in September 2011. It topped the UK and Australian charts, reached number five in the US, and has since been certified eight-times platinum in the UK.
The album contains the single "The A Team", which earned him the Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically. In 2012, Sheeran won the Brit Awards for Best British Male Solo Artist and British Breakthrough Act. "The A Team" was nominated for Song of the Year at the 2013 Grammy Awards, where he performed the song with Elton John.
UK-based hacker who sold unreleased Ed Sheeran tracks jailed
completemusicupdate.comA hacker who illegally accessed and then sold unreleased music by Ed Sheeran and Lil Uzi Vert has been handed an eighteen month jail sentence.Adrian Kwiatkowski from Ipswich pleaded guilty back in August to fourteen counts of criminal copyright infringement plus three counts of computer misuse and three offences under the Proceeds Of Crime Act.It followed an investigation that began at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in the US in 2019 when the management companies of several artists reported that someone going by the name of Spirdark had hacked into a number of cloud-storage accounts and downloaded unreleased music files.
He was then seeking to sell those files for bitcoin.Investigators in New York connected the email address used to set up Spirdark’s cryptocurrency wallet to Kwiatkowski and identified that the IP address of the device he’d used to hack one of the artist cloud storage accounts was in the UK.
At that point the case was referred to the City Of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit, aka PIPCU.Officers from PIPCU then arrested Kwiatkowski and seized his hard drive, finding 1263 unreleased songs by 89 artists.
He also had Bitcoin then worth £64,000, plus officers discovered he had deposited £67,275 into his bank account during 2018 and 2019, £61,855 of which was from his cryptocurrency accounts.When interviewed by police, Kwiatkowski quickly admitted to hacking the accounts of musicians and selling their songs online under the alias Spirdark.
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